We’re sorry, this post is not available in English.

Enterprise 2.0 is rapidly developing and spreading, in the biggest multinational companies, where is becoming a reality, and, more slowly within the PMI.
However, the application of Web 2.0 techniques and tool now bear exclusively to the business and not to the person.
It is emphasized the use of these resources to stimulate collaboration, content sharing and teamwork, but all of a watertight more formal than substantive. This brings advantages to the company in terms of ROI, because a more active and proactive employees’ work leads to a substantial reduction of costs.
But inside this box, where there is all Web 2.0 tools and so on, is there a little space reserved to the value of people and their relationships? 

The answer is simply no, and this is the problem: the Enterprise 2.0 has been so far focus uniquely on company and his interests. 

moolidoo, with its ethical and positive vision of the problems, arises as an instrument to create a space for the individual.
The ethical reputation system is a system capable of value the people relying on the positive relationships that exist between them, increasing thus, the reputation of individuals that bring more value to society and to the company itself. 

In addition to its own community moolidoo has developed the portability of its ethical approach through which it can give a value to any community, both external as Facebook and Twitter, both internal businesses.

by Ross Dawson, Feb 11, 2009
http://socialcomputingmagazine.com/

Recently I have been immersing myself in the Enterprise 2.0 space, organizing the second annual Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum which is coming up very soon, writing the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Report which will be launched at the same time (slightly afterwards for the international market), and helping a variety of large organizations to drive their Enterprise 2.0 initiatives forward.

It’s been a long time since I came up with my definition for Enterprise 2.0 as below. While I generally dislike jargon and the liberal addition of “2.0″ to words, I find the term Enterprise 2.0 highly meaningful because it is, in addition to tapping the value of Web 2.0 in a specific context, literally about creating the next version of the organization.

What stayed with me more than anything else from Andrew McAfee’s speech at our inaugural Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum last year, was one of his key conclusions: “Enterprise 2.0 will make companies less similar” (or as I always remembered it, ‘Enterprise 2.0 makes companies more different’).

Indeed, from a corporate perspective I think that Enterprise 2.0 is meaningless unless it results in competitive advantage, making organizations truly different from their competitors. While I fundamentally disagree with Nicholas Carr’s thesis that ‘IT doesn’t matter,’ the reality is he is largely right when considering most enterprise technology up until now, which has focused on business processes. However Enterprise 2.0 is in a completely different class because it is fundamentally social: it is about how people connect. Anyone who has been exposed to Web 2.0-style initiatives in organizations knows that how people use (or don’t use) social technologies are largely a function of the culture of the organization.

As such, any Enterprise 2.0 initiatives sit squarely at the intersection of technology and culture. These are technologies that facilitate interaction and the creation of value through participation, but the technologies are only as valuable as people’s desire to interact, collaborate, and create something worthwhile together.

This means that any attempt to implement Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches are dependent on both the culture of the organization today, but even more importantly, where the culture of the organization is heading. No change is almost as bad as a poor culture. The culture must be dynamic and have positive momentum for Enterprise 2.0 approaches to thrive and prosper, as they are all about making things different.

There is no one-size-fits-all for Enterprise 2.0 implementation. While we can certainly learn from what others have done well and not-so-well, every organization must find the path to value that will prosper in its own unique conditions. And so far the record is that fewer organizations have succeeded massively than have failed. This is not an easy path to take.

This means that any successful implementation of Enterprise 2.0 CANNOT be replicated. Since it exists at the intersection of technology and culture, no other company can duplicate what it has done, buy the same technology and set up the same pilots, and expect anything like the same thing to happen.

It is precisely the challenges of creating value from Enterprise 2.0 that make it so valuable. If you do it well, you will absolutely have created a more efficient, effective, productive, innovative, engaged organization than your competitors. And they won’t have a hope of doing the same.

by NewsGator Daily Blog, Jan. 12, 2009
http://blogs.newsgator.com

The concept of reciprocity was driven home to me last week when using TripAdvisor. This is one of my favorite travel sites as it employs a large and active community of fellow travelers who write reviews and share information. I use the site every time I travel to check out the real scoop on my intended destination and have been doing so for years. I was finally inspired to “give back” and be a good Web 2.0 citizen by writing a review of the Park Central New York hotel in Manhattan. This desire was purely intrinsic and I got to wondering what inspires reciprocity for enterprise social computing initiatives.
Certainly, that same spirit of giving back can and does exist in the workplace. This spirit may be inspired by the culture and it is this type of cultural influence that will greatly enhance opportunities for successful adoption and greater business value. But, what about more extrinsic factors? Rewards? Recognition? Compensation? They all matter and it is the wise organization that addresses these issues head-on when deploying social computing technologies within the enterprise. Of course, to enact any such program, metrics will be requested and perhaps even required. This is a far from trivial task. Andrew McAfee has written an excellent post proposing a model for Enterprise 2.0 Ratings, but there are many more qualitative criteria that could apply and should be used. Some examples might include:
• Decreased time to get an answer to a question
• Number of new connections made amongst people who haven’t worked together in the past
• Decrease in email volume specifically related to collaboration or content sharing
• Increase in expertise or knowledge discovery – “Are you more knowledgeable in subject matter X as a result of using social computing?”
• Increase in end user “satisfaction” – are end users seeing real value and how do they define that value?
Without reciprocity, enterprise social computing efforts can become dominated by a handful of more vocal and active participants which misses the point. It is the nature of emergent knowledge that is the key to realizing the profound benefits offered by blogs, wikis, communities, tagging and bookmarking.

by Niall Cook, Oct. 14, 2008
http://www.enterprise2dot0.com

To get the most from your Web 2.0 technologies, combine them with Enterprise 2.0.

by Billy Cripe and Vince Casarez, Jan. 06, 2009
http://esj.com

Enterprise 2.0 is an elusive buzzword-rich concept getting a lot of attention but without a common understanding or definition. Businesses want to be attentive to the desires and needs of their constituents, be they employees, customers, or partners, but they also want to protect their investments from technology fads and unsafe practices.

Enterprise 2.0 combines Web 2.0 technologies within a business context to derive greater business value than the individual Web 2.0 technologies may provide. The approach to get this done is a matter of wide debate and the path is littered with false starts and horror stories. In this article we will explain why Enterprise 2.0 is good for business, what Enterprise 2.0 deployments should include, and how it should be implemented within the organization.

In an American Scientist Online article about honey bees (see Note 1), we learned that honey bee scouts search for possible locations of a new hive, then communicate that information to the swarm members. Other bees consume this information, exam and evaluate a potential location, return to the swarm, and communicate their “thoughts” on how good the site is. Finally, when enough scouts promote the same site, a quorum is reached and the new hive location is selected.

This behavior in the humble honey bee community holds important lessons for businesses seeking to understand Enterprise 2.0. Taking a human-centric view of this bee behavior can lead to optimal business decisions expressed as valuing the following three principles:

* Diversity of independent information sources is critical to making the best decisions
* Aggregation followed by independent evaluation of the information leads to a core set of choices
* Collection and distribution of independent decisions enables a quorum to be reached as rapidly as possible

The exponential growth of information within the enterprise has been soundly documented. Contributing to this growth is the ease with which information is created and consumed. Web 2.0 technologies have increased user expectations regarding what is available while lowering the barrier to participation for those same users.

The adoption of these technologies is extraordinary. The popularity of Web sites such as Facebook (with almost 34 million monthly users) and MySpace (which averages 72 million active monthly visitors; see Note 2) are indicative of a diversity of users, and their adoption begs the question of why users are flocking to these systems. The answer is, like the honey bee scouts, they are communicating information to those with whom they have a common interest.

Business information is no longer communicated from just one information worker to another. Rather it is made available and then consumed, modified and repeated to all who show an interest in this information. No longer is the focus on pushing information to specific people. Instead, it is on collaborating with people. The Web 2.0 technologies enable a conversational approach to communication. The wealth and diversity of information that is being created independently is being shared and consumed conversationally.

Aggregation and Evaluation

When individuals participate in a conversation, they collect and evaluate the information from the other participants in their own minds and then respond. Web 2.0 technology takes the conversation and places it squarely on the Internet. The myriad of Web 2.0 sites (e.g. Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Blogger) have transformed the once single-channeled communication medium into a buzz of overlapping conversations and communities. For businesses, this buzz is both alluring and immense, but the public Web has few (often no) rules of engagement or control over what is said or how it is presented. Business has no way of completely controlling the messages about their products and services that evolve from these communities.

This is where Enterprise 2.0 differentiates itself from Web 2.0 technology. Enterprise 2.0 starts where Web 2.0 cannot — it originates within the business. On the public Web, the overriding presumption is that users begin their conversation with others anonymously. Any person may navigate to LinkedIn.com and browse public user profiles. This paradigm is flipped on its head within the enterprise setting. Users start off as known entities with a specific identity or role. After all, they are employees of an organization working towards a common goal, just like the honey bee scouts.

They start with a shared purpose — the success of the business. Enterprise 2.0 capabilities begin with these shared business drivers that are missing from Web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 then combines the many components of Web 2.0 capabilities into a complete and comprehensive platform on which business conversations and tasks are executed in context of the business goals. The Enterprise 2.0 platform combines all of the point features of Web 2.0 sites onto a single, business-enabled, context-aware system.

The successful Enterprise 2.0 platform is modular in its architecture. This way, businesses are able to add the features required as the business grows. There are three fundamental capabilities that any rich Enterprise 2.0 platform should incorporate from the outset.

The first is a centralized content or information management system. The concept of collaborating always begs the question of collaborating on what. Like the honey bee, workers are collaborating on shared goals that involve passing information in an efficient way. In business settings, this type of content sharing is subject to regulations and best practices. Where the human assembles conversational information in the mind, an Enterprise 2.0 platform aggregates conversational information in the content management repository.

Second, the rich Enterprise 2.0 platform incorporates native collaboration services. A rich Enterprise 2.0 platform should include participation services for social real-time conversations (e.g., instant messages), social content creation (e.g., wikis) and socially defined trust and authority systems (e.g., tagging and ratings). Where humans converse with voices in real time, the Enterprise 2.0 platform facilitates asynchronous conversations between not only people but also between communities and systems.

Finally, the rich Enterprise 2.0 platform must enable enterprise applications to participate in the business conversation. Knowledge and process workers collaborate on information that is used as the input to or output from business applications. A true Enterprise 2.0 platform explicitly enables employees to leverage technology to further the success of the company, not their personal social lives. Where humans converse on wide ranges of topics, the Enterprise 2.0 platform ensures that those conversations are relevant to the business.

Collection, Voting, Action

In all, Enterprise 2.0 is about bringing content to the employee in context so that attention will be kept on topic. The Enterprise 2.0 platform forms an information fabric in which knowledge and process workers are woven together with colleagues, customers, systems, and information. All relevant information is presented to the employee in the context that best suits the job or task at hand. Users are encouraged to participate conversationally with the systems, colleagues, and information that make up the daily work.

Ultimately, the goal of this participation is to tap into the energies and expertise of every individual and to deliver a synthesis of the good ideas. Aggregating the varied inputs, precipitating the valuable outcomes through team-enabled decision making, and enabling employees to make better business decisions is the result.

There is no substitute for creating an ecosystem inside the business where relationships and information come together in shared context. Users must be able to participate seamlessly with each other using systems that allow them to share information. The process efficiencies gained, the business intelligence gained, the trends predicted and spotted all lead to a significant competitive advantage. This new emergent enterprise is what business and Enterprise 2.0 is all about.

Notes:

2. Bryant Urstadt, “Social Networking is not a Business,” Technology Review, August, 2008

by Timothy Fisher, Mar. 06, 2008
http://blog.timothyfisher.com

Generation Y includes those in the age range 13 to 31. This is the largest generation ever, even surpassing the population of the Baby Boomers. In total their are about 80 million “GenYers”. This is a generation that has been brought up on technology. They have always had computers, cell phones, email, and instant messaging. They are now very familiar with Web 2.0 and social networking. This is also the next generation of employees that companies will be hiring over the next decade. This generation will come into your company with the expectation of Web 2.0 technologies, just as the previous generations expected email. Using social networks is as natural to GenYers as email is to GenXers.

GenYers have seen how Web 2.0 technology can be used extremely effectively in their social life and will expect nothing less in their professional life. They will wonder why a large company is not using a social network to enable and connect employees. They will wonder why their company is not using blogs to spread their message and respond to thier customers in a very transparent manner. Blogs and social networks allow GenYers to build networks of friends and associates. The good news is that these are all questions that should be asked because they have the power to transform your business, and if you are not asking those questions internally now, your company will soon be left behind in this new I.T. revolution. This new revolution is one that brings Web 2.0 technology and culture into the enterprise and it is often referred to as Enterprise 2.0.

Even as Enterprise 2.0 takes hold in many large corporations, there are still many other corporations that remain ignorant of this revolution. Some mistakenly think that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is just about technology. They are the companies that are adverse to taking risks on new technology, so they quietly ignore the Web/Enterpise 2.0 revolution. The truth is that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are not about technology. They are more about culture, social interaction, new ways of uniting your employee base, and new ways of effectively marketing your brand.
Enterprise 2.0 brings with it a massive change in culture that many companies are not ready or able to deal with. Companies that rely on strict top-down hierarchical organizations have the most to fear from the GenYers and the Enterprise 2.0 revolution. Enterprise 2.0 expands the power of the masses in your company at the expense of the power of the senior management and executives. When individuals act together socially, whether it is for personal projects or business related projects, their power becomes much greater than what they could have achieved working as an individual. GenYers expect their thoughts and ideas to be listened to and acted upon if they are good ones. They are not willing to sit back passively and follow the direction of someone simply because they are higher up on the “corporate ladder.” Enterprise 2.0 technologies allow a company to harvest ideas and innovations throughout the company rather than from a select few that sit on the top floors of their headquarters. Authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff refer to this inversion of power and influence as the Groundswell in a new book titled Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, published by Forrester Research.

Enterprise 2.0 technologies allow a company to open up a bidirectional communication path between itself and its customers. Any single company is limited in terms of their internal resources and the amount of innovation and creativity that can be sourced from them. However, a company that can effectively use a much larger global community of social networkers can expand its abilty to innovate on a massive scale. If your company is not taking advantage of this ability to collaborate globally, your competitors are, and they will quickly surpass you with their ability to innovate.

Social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn allow individuals to meet more people, expand their social networks, and get more and better information faster and easier. Used inside of a company, social networking communities can energize an employee base and build a massively linked platform for knowledge sharing and collaboration. This platform will be a vehicle to capture tacit knowledge in ways never before possible. IBM has an internal social network called Beehive that has over 30,000 employees on it. A social network like this used internally will not only help your company share knowledge but you will find developers collaborating on innovative uses of technology, sales people mining new leads and exploring new sales opportunities, and management with a tool to monitor the pulse of the company.

A social network can also be used very effectively to create buzz around your brand and to increase your brand visibility. The book Groundwell describes how a company can make use of Web 2.0 technologies to get great benefits in marketing, product development, and customer support. Enterprise 2.0 is also where you will need to turn to find the best and brightest employees amongst the GenYers. More people, especially the younger ones, are moving away from large job boards like Monster and Dice as sources of jobs and instead finding jobs through their online social networks. Are employees at your company blogging? Does your company have any presence in the Web 2.0 world? If the answer is no, your company very well may be left out of the employer pool considered by the best and the brightest employees. [...]

Like other methods to innovate business, also Enterprise 2.0 could have different strategy to be adopted inside the company.

The common approaches are top-down and bottom-up.

In the first case the innovation arrives from the top management, and the goals of business collaboration are ROI, the maintenance of the leadership of the management, the achievement of the completely readiness of employees and teach the collaboration culture.

In the bottom-up approach, the innovation start from the employees which try advantage from the instruments those permit the collaboration with colleagues. They would interact together, identify themselves on their own company and receive trust from it, and spread enterprise 2.0 culture.

Apparently, there is only one goal in common, the culture, and this is the based of every winner innovation.
Management and employees have lo learn the culture of participation, and build on it their own goals.

moolidoo services offer a way to facilitate the spreading of the culture, the achievement of the goals and the overcoming of the barriers like aversion risk, low readiness to change, preference for hierarchy and power position :
- give moos to employees as benefit
- give the possibility to increase personal reputation day by day exchanging moos as result of collaborative behaviors.

by Tim O’Reilly, Dec. 27, 2008
http://radar.oreilly.com

What do Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com have in common, besides their extraordinary success? They are organizations that are infused with IT in such a way that it leads to a qualitative change in their entire business.

I get frustrated when I see people highlighting use of social media–blogging, wikis, twitter, customer feedback systems like Dell IdeaStorm or MyStarbucksIdea–as if they were exemplars of what has come to be called “Enterprise 2.0.”

As I said in my keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo NY (and in a followup radar post), WalMart is a better example of Enterprise 2.0 than any of these more trendy examples of user contribution systems. If Google’s key innovation with PageRank was to recognize that a link was a vote, which could be counted and measured to get better search results, so too, WalMart recognized early on that a purchase was a vote. Each company built real-time information systems to capture and respond to that vote. WalMart built a supply chain in which goods are automatically re-ordered as they go out the door, with algorithms based on rate of sale controlling the reorders. Google built a better search engine, in which pages that were “better linked” were given priority over the ones produced by pure keyword matches. They went on to build real-time systems to measure what John Battelle called the database of intentions, as expressed by people’s queries and subsequent clickstream data, as well as an ad auction system that prices ads in real-time based on the predicted likelihood of the ad being clicked on.

I came to see just how closely MyBarackObama.com emulated these ideas of the real-time enterprise in accounts of the Houdini project, a bold program in which poll watchers eliminated the names from voters who had actually made it to the polling station from the “get out the vote” call lists:

While the hot line was too overwhelmed to be of much use, the source said the program itself still proved a smashing success….the campaign was able to clean 1.6 million voters from the call lists they distributed to canvassers that afternoon, making those lists 25 percent shorter on average.

While the infrastructure for data reporting broke down under the pressure of the election, the general trend is clear here: competitive advantage comes from capturing data more quickly, and building systems to respond automatically to that data.

Consider MyBarackObama.com as a kind of vast machine, with humans as extensions of the programmatic brain: volunteers log in to get their get-out-the-vote call lists. They place their calls, then use the web to report back their results. Those results modify the call lists for the next volunteer. At the other end, the Houdini volunteers are taking note of who is actually coming out to vote, allowing the system to dispatch additional attention to hot spots, for example where there is an undervote compared to the campaign’s projections. Meanwhile, the pruned call lists make the volunteers more effective. Inside the machine, programmers are tuning the algorithms, while top campaign staffers are making key decisions to adjust the resource mix.

Now put these three examples, Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama together, and ask yourself what they tell you about the future of business, military operations, or any large organization.

Sensing, processing, and responding (based on pre-built models of what matters, “the database of expectations,” so to speak) is arguably the hallmark of living things. We’re now starting to build computers that work the same way. And we’re building enterprises around this new kind of sense-and-respond computing infrastructure. In this sense, you can argue that Microsoft’s term “Live Software” is the best name yet for the kind of software-infused enterprise we’re building.

It’s essential to recognize that each of these systems is a hybrid human-machine system, in which human actions are part of the computational loop. Back in 1998, when I was trying to understand just how people were using Perl and other scripting languages on the web, I came to recognize that web applications, unlike desktop applications, still have the programmers inside them. Perl was called “the duct tape of the internet” precisely because it was used for programming that was only expected to last a short time; the programmers were still there, constantly tweaking the application. (I first began using the image of “the Mechanical Turk” in my talks about this aspect of web applications in 2003.)

What became clear in the ensuing decade is that humans are not just part of the programming, but also sensors and actuators for computers. Our aggregate behavior is measured, monitored, and becomes feedback that improves the overall intelligence of the system. That is why I’ve said that the defining characteristic of Web 2.0 applications is that they “harness collective intelligence.”

Aside: I seem to have lost the battle to define Web 2.0 as” the use of the network as platform to build systems that get better the more people use them. Perhaps its the lure of the obvious: companies and products that harness explicit user contribution are easier to recognize than those that pursue the more subtle and difficult task of harnessing implicit contribution. Or perhaps it’s the persistent gravitational tug of the idea that the heart of Web 2.0 is ad-supported business models; therefore, enterprise features that look like those of well-known companies featuring user contribution and ad-supported business models must by definition also be “2.0.” For me, the far more profound and powerful systems come from harnessing both explicit and implicit human contribution.

Again, consider MyBarackObama.com. It definitely harnessed explicit contribution, providing a platform for volunteers to organize and host local calling parties, to blog, or perform other campaign activities. But ultimately, Obama’s ground game–old fashioned precinct-level organizing, amped up to a new level by an army of distributed volunteers armed with mobile phones and coordinated via a web application–was the key to his victory. The “explicit” social media elements of MyBarackObama.com paled in impact compared to the development of a next generation electronic nervous system, in which volunteers were trained, deployed, and managed by a web application who used them, in John McMullen’s memorable phrase, as “souls in the great machine.”